Talk:General Survival Guidelines/@comment-75.139.151.127-20160221181835/@comment-70.48.114.148-20160221184808
Most handguns and rifles are louder than most shotguns (if we're talking law of averages with regards to barrel length and commonly used cartridges). The drawbacks of a shotgun isn't in their loudness, but how much of a precision tool they are, and how much they are outclassed in nearly every respect by rifles, especially in a modern context. A magazine-fed, select-fire or semiautomatic rifle is going to offer deeper magazines, better precision, a much greater effective range, more reliable penetration of barrier materials and armor, lighter and easier to carry ammunition, and much more rapid reloads, and all in a package that offers much the same form factor and weight. Shotguns, in contrast, typically hold less than ten rounds, and when they feature a capacity larger than this, it's usually do to large, chunky, difficult-to-carry magazines. With regards to precision, they lose out. Despite the tightest patterning shells having less than an inch of spread per foot traveled by the shot, these 8 or 9 pellets are still going to be dispersed much more widely than the beaten zone of any rifle at an equivalent distance, meaning that while a hit on a specific point is likely at a given range, it is nowhere near the guaranteed bet that it would be with a rifle. The practical effective range of shotguns is much lower than any rifle as well, measured in a few dozen meters if the shooter's slinging buckshot. If slugs are used, it can be somewhat greater than this, but at that point, the shooter is again basically using a slower-to-operate, more-difficult-to-load, harder-to-manage rifle, and still isn't reaching as far. Shotgun shells, buckshot or slug, are also far less likely to penetrate any kind of armor than a rifle cartridge, with individual pellets of buckshots hitting about as hard as perhaps a .32ACP pistol round, which are undoubtedly on the lower end of comparison for any kind of cartridge. Slugs stand to do significant amounts of trauma to an unarmored target, but their utility in penetrating armor is basically non-existent, and while they may defeat some barrier materials, so would most rifle cartridges, and the damage isn't that much greater, either. All this is a moot point anyway, against the intended target, if you have to hit them in the head. The ammunition, previously mentioned, is fairly bulky, especially compared to something like the 5.56x45mm cartridges used by most AR-15s and other modern sporting rifles. Executing a complete reload is hands-down one of the greatest disadvantages here in a comparison of the weapons in a tactical setting; a single magazine can be loaded and readyin less than a second or two by someone practiced and experienced with a magazine-fed rifle, and when the reload's complete, they're ready to go with perhaps as many as 30 rounds ready to go. A well-trained individual using a shotgun with a fixed magazine, loading one round at a time, assuming they could accomplish the utterly insane (and practically inhuman) speed of one round per second (until the magazine is full), could take almost ten times as long to reload one-third of the ammunition. This is a losing bet for the shooter in all accounts, especially if the chief threat to the shooter is a swarming mass of individuals trying to close to melee range.